There are four essential economic freedoms. First is the freedom to work. Second of those freedoms is the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. Third is the freedom to own and control one’s property. Fourth is the freedom to participate in a free market—to contract freely for goods and services and to achieve one’s full potential without government limits on opportunity, economic independence, and growth.

Ronald Reagan

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Edmund Burke

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

Ronald Reagan

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Ronald Reagan

If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.

Alexander Hamilton

Man is not free unless government is limited.

Ronald Reagan

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.

Thomas Jefferson

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

Robert Bork

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

James Madison

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.

James Madison

WILL is defending Wisconsin’s children against aggression from Washington

George Will

In our Constitution, we the people tell the government what it can do, and it can do only those things listed in that document and no others, because here in America, we the people are in charge.

Ronald Reagan

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.

The City of Milwaukee plans to build a 2.1-mile fixed street car line in downtown Milwaukee. General construction of the $64.6 million rail line woud be funded by $55 million in federal transit aid (previously allocated twenty years ago) and $9.7 million in tax-incremental financing district funds. However, there are other costs associated with the street car. Construction will require the modification and relocation of underground utility facilities such as cables and gas and transmission lines. Cost estimates for these tasks exceed $55 million, potentially doubling the whole cost of the streetcar.

The City intends to make the utilities and their customers pay those utility relocation costs instead of raising the money from its own taxpayers. On behalf of Brett Healy, president of the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, and 35 other WE Energies customers, WILL has filed a challenge to Milwaukee's illegal cost-shifting scheme with the Public Service Commission. Our goal is to prevent the City from passing costs on to the utilities - who will pass those costs on to customers all around southeastern Wisconsin - which will force the City to decide whether the streetcar is worth spending an additional $55 million or more of its own money on.

The PSC has issued its first substantive ruling in the case, determining that it has the authority to decide what amount - if any - of cost-shifting of the utility relocation costs by the city to the utilities is "reasonable". It will set that issue for a hearing, where we intend to argue that shifting nearly half the cost of a government project onto ratepayers who will not benefit in any way from the project is utterly unreasonable.

However, legislation included in the 2013-2015 biennial budget made it unlawful for municipalities to require utilities to bear the costs of utility relocation and alteration necessitated by streetcar projects. At the request of WILL and the ATU utilities, the PSC issued a final ruling that this new law prohibited Milwaukee from passing on its utility relocation costs to the utilities and their ratepayers. We expect the City to appeal to circuit court